By Myles Ludwig
This year’s crop of Oscar contenders has stirred a media tantrum. The controversy appears to be about artistic license.
The list is dominated by three films ― Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, Argo ― based on, inspired by or, to use that TV trope, ripped (not torn or copied like a computer file) from the headlines. Another – Django Unchained – skirts the issue by springing from a nest of spaghetti Westerns, claiming to be an hommage-ish mash-up of mythological roots.
The first three copped to fictionalizing real events and dialogue for dramatic purposes, i.e. to bring in the bucks. Django I saw: Superfly in the saddle, minus Curtis Mayfield. I haven’t seen Silver Linings Playbook, but clips of Mr. DeNiro’s parental anguish seem quite familiar to me. Only Life of Pi and Beasts of the Southern Wild have admitted to being outside the recognized bounds of reality.
What’s the big deal?
I didn’t see all of the above films, but I never felt I was seeing something real while I was watching them.
Certainly Ben Affleck’s stolid performance did little to reveal the intricacies of the man behind the master of disguise, as Tony Mendez was called, or to tell us something about what was going on inside those Marx Brothers minds of the bureaucratic zealots in perfectly manicured beards. And, was it really conceivable that the residents of that ratty vacation villa in Abbottabad soundly slept through the helo-crash and all those door-busting explosions, as half the villagers came over the hill to catch the action, like the pitchfork-waving peasants in Frankenstein?
Why should we punish Kathryn Bigelow for including a plausibly deniable scene of torture in her film when it was our dirty little secret? Why should we damn Ben Affleck for compacting the escaped diplomats from two groups to one and sticking in a chase-the-plane cliché for fun? Why should we scour Steven Spielberg for making sure the pocket watch sounds right while skewing the history? That’s like asking if Hamlet is a true story or if Medea really ate her kids in a tasty slice of pie (or was that Tyler Perry in drag?).
They’re just movies.
OK, this hybrid genre ― the docudrama, the re-enactment ― tries to stake a claim on our understanding of narrative territory, while simultaneously denying it. It’s confusing, yes. But that doesn’t make it bad ― or good. No doubt we can soon expect to see reeler-than-real versions of the whole miserable Steve Jobs story, the what’s-left-after-Oprah Lance Armstrong story, and, heaven help us, the Phil “walking spectacle” Spector story with Al Pacino in a fright wig. Likely the Oscar Pistorius story is coming. Poor O.J.: he missed his movie moment, but left us with the cloying daughters of his lawyer Bob Kardashian to haunt our media dreams.
I have been wondering why this has caused such a media snit. It’s nothing new. Despite Jean-Luc Godard’s absolutist claim (he was young then, and absolutes had value in those days) that “cinema is truth 24 frames a second” we’re quite used to the disclaimer, “no relation to characters living or dead.” Yes, these movies blur the border a bit between fact and fancy, but maybe, like government, we get the kinds of movies we deserve. With characteristic Hollywood sleight-of-hand these movies, like politicians, pretend to have their cake and eat it too, while asking us to pay for a bite.
And we fall for it. In fact, we yearn for it.
I once took a fiction writing class with John Rechy, the author of the scandalous-at-the- time novel, City of Night. I remember him very clearly saying fiction writers should strive not for reproducing the truth, but for verisimilitude. As if.
I think we have become so buffaloed by images, so blinded by the optics of everyday life, we have elevated our own ersatz. Case in point: “Celebrity Rehab.” Case in point: Cyberwar may be virtual, but it’s still war. Case in point: Monsanto claims ownership of the offspring of its seed. Does that make it a corporate baby daddy?
We’ve grown fond of being hoisted on our own petard. Hooray for pleather!
I remember earlier films like the Eddy Duchin story, the Benny Goodman story, the Glenn Miller story, the Gene Krupa story, etc. I don’t think I believed they were true stories. I remember magazines called True Story and True Confessions. Were they true? Nope. I remember when a hot media topic was: “What is Johnny Carson Really Like?” So what?
We like to be fooled by the magician, but we are panting to learn the secret of the trick. To pull away the mask and peer inside with our eyes closed. Yes, OK, Michelle Obama can do the Dougie.
Theatre critic Christopher Isherwood wrote in The New York Times: “Conflict, suffering, man’s reliable inhumanity to man: the world will never be without the raw material for wrenching drama … But there are many ways of writing about the sorrows of human experience, even when … drawing on a specific real-world calamity. Different challenges too. Stick to the facts, and the story may fail to take dramatic shape. Stray too far into the imagination, and it may lose the power it derives from allegiance to actual events.”
His colleagues Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott wrote: “The truth is we love our movies because of their lies, beautiful or not. It’s journalists and politicians who owe us the truth.”
As if.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.